Embodiments of the invention relate to data management, and more particularly, to providing an application programming interface (hereinafter “API”) for the internal data of a source application.
Many production environments include older software applications that are still in use, but are no longer in development. While these older software applications may be functioning properly in their originally-intended role, often times a business may wish to modify these applications to introduce new features. For instance, the business may wish to add a reporting mechanism to a software application that generates and maintains a set of data. However, such modifications are often difficult. For instance, the business may not have access to the source code for the original application. As a second example, even if the source code is available, the architecture used to develop the original application may not easily support the introduction of new features. Continuing this example, this problem may be compounded if the software developers are no longer familiar with the programming language the source code for the older software application is written in. Additionally, even creating an external tool to construct reports using the data may be difficult, since the older software application may not provide an API for accessing the data.